Decade after Truro murder, labs shape up

TRURO — Ten years ago, the brutal murder of Truro writer Christa Worthington plunged the close-knit Outer Cape community into the center of a murder mystery.

K.C. MYERS

TRURO — Ten years ago, the brutal murder of Truro writer Christa Worthington plunged the close-knit Outer Cape community into the center of a murder mystery, a sensational trial and a venomous battle over race.

Worthington, a former fashion writer who left behind a life in New York and Paris to raise her daughter in a quiet family cottage, was found beaten and stabbed to death Jan. 6, 2002. Her 2½-year-old daughter, Ava, was alone with her mother's body for two days.

Investigators pressed for nearly four years to arrest a suspect as a colorful cast of characters and gruesome details emerged, but they were stymied by a backlog in the state's crime lab that delayed his DNA test for more than a year.

A DNA sample taken from Christopher McCowen, Worthington's garbage collector, was taken to the state's overburdened crime lab in Sudbury in March 2004. It was not tested until April 2005.

The sample matched the semen found at the crime scene. McCowen was arrested days later and is now serving a life sentence for Worthington's murder and rape.

The delay in testing might have seemed like yet another numbing indignity for the family.

But DNA was also the silent, unemotional piece of science that brought the case to conclusion.

Since the 1990s, the state's district attorneys have been fighting for reform of the crime lab, said Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O'Keefe.

It took more than a decade for the Legislature and the governor's office to be convinced that Massachusetts — with its universities and advanced biotech research firms — had one of the most out-of-date crime labs in the country, O'Keefe said.

"We really had to get into the 21st century," O'Keefe said. "We were really so far behind the curve."

The district attorneys were the "end-users" of the archaic laboratory. "No one else seemed to pay attention," O'Keefe said.

That changed in 2004 when O'Keefe, as a part of a state working group, drafted successful legislation that appointed a state undersecretary of forensic science and technology. This brought all the state's crime testing under one department head, creating a streamlined process that didn't exist before, he said.

In 2005, just one month after McCowen was arrested and charged with Worthington's murder, O'Keefe testified on Beacon Hill about the need for more funding for the crime lab.

By 2006, the Massachusetts State Police Crime Lab had more than tripled its staff from 2004 levels, according to the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association 2006 report titled "The Justice Initiative."

But, the report noted, the lab needed an additional 50 chemists to process the material that the district attorneys needed to use in their investigations.

"As of late summer 2006, it takes approximately 10 months for the lab to screen suspect material for biological content and to conduct DNA analysis," the report stated.

The situation has continued to improve. As of this year, the wait time for DNA evidence in a high-profile case, such as the Worthington murder, is down to a few weeks, O'Keefe said.

"We've got robotics and automation, so where we used to have to do one sample at a time, now we can do 16 cases at a time," said Maj. James Connolly, the state's deputy division commander of forensic services.

A long-standing commitment to reducing the state's DNA sample backlog, speeding up the testing time and expanding the severely crowded laboratories has paid off.

When McCowen's DNA sample went to the Sudbury lab in 2004, it was the only major laboratory in the state, with two small satellite buildings in Agawam and Danvers, Connolly said.

Today there are nine facilities, including two major ones in Sudbury and Maynard, he said.

"We're closer to our customers," Connolly said. "It used to take us hours to get to a crime scene. Now it takes an hour."

In 2009, the backlog of untested DNA samples was at 4,000. It's now down to 2,000, Connolly said. In 2004, the crime lab budget was $4.5 million, he said. In fiscal year 2011, it was up to $12.9 million.

Support from Gov. Deval Patrick's administration and federal grants have helped a lot.

But there's room for improvement, O'Keefe said.

"We're still playing catch-up," O'Keefe said. "We have to continue to keep this at the forefront."

But backlogs are a nationwide problem.

About 40,000 DNA samples were backlogged by the end of 2005, according to a nationwide sampling of forensic laboratories by the U.S. Department of Justice. By 2009, the backlog had risen to more than 100,000.

The Department of Justice dedicated $400 million between 2004 and 2009 to state crime labs.

Connolly said Massachusetts will use its federal grant money to make the processing of DNA faster, with the goal of completing them in "real-time" — that is, with no wait at all.

Defense attorney Peter Elikann of the Massachusetts Bar Association said the investment is worth it, more so than investing in prisons. DNA testing works as a preventative measure in fighting crime because it truly solves the crime, he said. It puts guilty people in prison and frees the innocent, he added.

"It's a positive thing for justice," Elikann said.

But the Worthington case also highlighted the controversial side of DNA. In January 2005, around the third anniversary of the murder, O'Keefe took the rare move of asking random men in Truro for DNA samples to see if the police could find a match with the semen found on Worthington's body.

The measure offended many citizens and drew an angry response from the American Civil Liberties Union. The 120 samples were returned to the men the following year, after McCowen had been arrested.

McCowen was tested earlier along with others who knew or had even casual contact with Worthington. Keith Amato, a relative by marriage of Ava's father, Tony Jackett, also gave a DNA sample early on.

Following McCowen's conviction, Amato requested his DNA be returned to him. Eventually the physical evidence was returned, but Amato's DNA profile remained in state police files.

The ACLU, which took on Amato's case, filed suit. In 2009, Suffolk Superior Court Judge Nancy Staffier Holtz ruled against Amato, noting the law requires DNA and other case information to be retained for a minimum of 15 years, or six years after all appeals are exhausted.

In August 2011, the state Appeals Court ruled that, in fact, Amato's case has merit and can go forward once again.

The case is back before the court for further proceedings. There is a status conference scheduled for Feb. 16, said Christopher Ott, spokesman for the ACLU.

DNA has such power that it can be dangerous in the wrong hands, Ott said. Insurance companies, for example, could use it to deny benefits to customers based on knowledge gained from it, he said.

"These are issues of privacy. DNA samples provide a lot of information, not just about the person tested, (but) also blood relatives," Ott said.